Pre-Meeting

Detroit: RocketFiber does not donate bandwidth ($600/mo $400 for bandwidth and $200 for roof rental) - Donated connectivity, prolly not if we were a for-profit - 123net is donating bandwidth and also donating an IP block

Introductions

mai - she/her/they/them - japanese ice dish, green tea and whatnot on it

We sent the specs for Storquest for the mount on their building on Friday. We also presented the possibility of listing them as a "community partner" if they would be open to negotiating the rental fee down or away entirely.

eve - pistachio ice cream

sierk - no english name for it, salad w/ iceberg lettuce, romaine lettuce, leek, onion, and raw herring. yesterday i had poke nachos.

Node Mounts & Outreach

jenny: sent e-mail to brewster + jonah, who said pief's not really involved anymore. there is going to be activity on the tower soon, so it might be a good time to install stuff. richmond open wifi? they want to come to a meeting and figure something out with us. they also want to be able to turn off their services w/o repercussions. their happy to say that we're working together.

Discussion: Meeting with Jesse

we went around the table and cehcked what kinds of questions we had:

worker owned coop vs. member/consumer owned coop

when to have separate legal entitites vs. one legal entity

we took take-away notes:

max: don't think it's a good idea to start paying people to do mesh work. seems like you could start burning people who have already put in a lot of effort and who are not going to get paid. I wanted to get into this as a fun thing to do, not as a second job.

mai: one of the things jessie clarified for us. there's different things that need to be done: making the firmware, updating it, going out and mounting gear on roofs. sudo mesh has already been very open. if there's people in the community that feel like something needs to be done there's nothing stopping them from going to start a worker owned coop or similar. it definitely makes it more exclusive if it's volunteer based because it excludes people who don't have lots of free time to work on it. what jessie recommended is retaining the sudo mesh organization and then whoever is interested can create a different spinoff entity (or entitites) - especially for different types of liability (eg; installing, running a VPN, etc) - and lots of different types of skills/interest levels. it seems like there's enough interest from people in the group that want to build some kind of spin-off organization (like for worker co-operative) that would be willing to do work for peoples open

this meeting really clarified

max: i used to work in an observatory, where there were paid staff that would clean the bathrooms, and volunteers would teach kids. then some volunteers started getting paid, and the rest of the volunteers disappeared. i don't see how we can pay people w/ just a 10k grant.

ben: re: convo with jesse - compartmentalization of things was also discussed. no one in the group has to make the decision to make a group / org / worker coop. nothing to stop people from organizing to get people online, or start another 501c3, etc - nothing preventing a plurality of entities existing. eg; an org dedicated to the backbone (eg working with paxio) - we can have many of those - not a decision task of sudo mesh but rather the decentralized nature of the mesh itself encourages it. Discussion with Jesse included how can we leverage this to reduce our liability, increase our resiliency, and give ourselves more options moving forward.

jenny: along those same lines. one of the educational services that sudo mesh can provide in staying as a fully volunteer organization is how to build out coops or non-profits and documenting how to build coalitions around building out e.g. a bayt area wide network. documenting different organizational models / entity structures / organizational sustainability.

jehan: i think the core characteristic of a mesh is that people own their own hardware. so it makes a lot of sense that there would be professionals that know how to service the hardware. i don't know how much it needs to be in the official venue of sudomesh, but at the same time there are a lot of different related projects that people bring to the group auxiliary (garden mesh)

marc: how we're talking about structuring is just recapitlating how the internet works already in practice - has been twisted in this weird corporate way in the US, but other orgs (eg Guifi) already had this model and are a good example. Why we separated the network from the nonprofit - on advice from wlan-slovenia to allow other non- or for-profits to form and join / extend the network.

benny: Jesse cited other instances of all-volunteer nonprofits who started paying people and failed. Also mentioned Riseup as an org that grew to a size that they simply had to start paying people

mai: non profit has a public purpose, and everything it does have to meet that purpose. the non-profit can apply for funding to support different projects that align with their public purpose goals. whereas the worker coop can do things specifically for its workers. how to have these two models work together, and what the pros and cons are, is something I think we should think about. how to get them to work together beneficially.

sierk: meeting wasn't about how we start paying people - rather, if we do, pros and cons of different strategies. decision would be made in a convo with this group. one takeaway is that a worker coop is not always the solution, can sometimes be better as an llc. since our mission is specific to educational activities. as a non-profit, we can provide recommended business models or ways of working with our materials or contracting with us that we would support.

jenny - can actually provide paid services and even services outside the scope - just capped at a certain %age of income and may have to pay Unrelated Business Income Tax

robb - we should figure out our scope - do we want to provide for Oakland, CA, the USA? Can we provide a roadmap for what will get us there?

Seemed like he felt strongly from separating the educational aspect from the infrastructure aspect

Had a lot to say about being a nonprofit and paying people / maintaining infrastructure. Felt like a worker coop might be riskier / more unknowns.

eve - does everyone know about the east bay broadband consortium?

jenny - seemed like it was maybe out of date? i contacted them a while ago fairly formally, but I don't think they responded. but that was a while ago.

jenny - two last bullet points from jesse meeting -- might want to minimize the sudomesh board to 3 people with no assets, and change model to use a membership governance structure. the members can vote to remove the board at any time (they're like a puppet board that's just there to be liable). and that we should probably get officers liability insurance asap.

ben - next steps for me were going to be to write up what one possible worker coop or other entity might really look like and how it would interact with sudomesh. have a more concrete strategy for what we would do as an organization, for instance, we could talk about what kinds of insurance sudomesh wants to have, etc.

sierk - maybe after we get this grant in, let's plan a barbecue and chat about this more! i definitely want to hear more from max, and I think leslie too had some reservations. thinking we should hang out and chat more and get on the same page.

jenny - also, action item: talk to an OSHA consultant for an hour or two. We shoulid do that anyway. Maybe someone in the community would do it pro bono; I wouldn't mind paying someone, either.

jehan - i used to do construction and we did not abide by the OSHA rules, but we should here!

robb - are we putting the cart ahead of the horse? i.e. what if we don't get the grant money.

sierk - yeah but we might have another grant coming up in three months. we want to be on the same page before the money is there. then people really might walk away because they're upset. i think we can be on the same page, but im not sure if we are right now.

mai - i think there's a lot of potential to do crowdfunding. i don't think it's just going ot be grant money dropped on us. there's a lot of people in silicion valley who make al ot of money and realize how broken the internet is, and they want to be involved in a project to fix it. and they want to be involved is to throw money at it. and if we can be there to accept that, it could be good. i think we can't just wait for a grant--there's a lot of interest in this project, there's a lot of people that want to be involved. fundraising isn't just about taking people's money, it's about finding ways to help people be involved in something they believe in. the narrative about how we're doing it, our organizational structure, etc. is tied to how we raise money.

jehan - monkey brains did a kickstart. they were offering their existing ISP service, but in a kickstarter format. they definitely pulled that off.

sierk - one of the things in the mozilla thing that seemed is important is being open with our code and resources, as well as the code of conduct. not necessarily the content, but that a code exists, so that if they run into an issue, they know where to go. i heard from jenny that we adopted the sacred space policy from the omni. would be good if we have something. treat people w/ respect, no racism, bullying. a place where people can anonymously report behavior. maybe next week we can decide on a temporary formulation of that. if people want to help out making a proposal we could do that on saturday or sunday.

blake - id be open if you just choose one yourself and then we can ammend it next week.

sierk - i already linked one standard one. maybe we can just add a link somewhere. it's not on our wiki or our website.

ben: temperature check--would people be okay with asking on social media what people would want to see in a community network? what they're interested in, etc.? blog posts.

Accessibility / Code / Code of Conducts / Contributer Files etc

via Sierk:

Assuming we have no "code of conduct" yet, I couldn't find one on our wiki nor website. I (=Sierk) propose to adopt a "code of conduct" for contributors to Sudo Mesh projects.

A version that is commonly used by open source communities (including by Mozilla for example) is the "Contributor Covenant".
We could use it as-is, adapt it to our missions/values, but we could also write our own.
UPDATE: According to Jenny, Sudo Mesh already adopted Omni's Statement of Solidarity, if this is sufficient as code of conduct***, this proposal might turn out to be superflucious.
Instead, the proposal would be to adding references/links, to what we already adopted, on our website and in the README files in our git repos, etc.
(**what about, for example, about the Safer Space Policy, did we adopt those also? do we want/need to adopt that or something like that?)
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